Aerobic exercise is a popular form of exercise that improves one's cardiovascular health by reducing blood pressure and providing other benefits to the human body. Aerobic exercise generally involves low intensity physical exertion over a long duration of time. Typically, the human body can adequately supply enough oxygen to meet the body's demands at the intensity levels involved with aerobic exercise. Popular forms of aerobic exercise include running, jogging, swimming, and cycling among others activities. In contrast, anaerobic exercise typically involves high intensity exercises over a short duration of time. Popular forms of anaerobic exercise include strength training and short distance running.
Many choose to perform aerobic exercises indoors, such as in a gym or their home. Often, a user uses an aerobic exercise machine to have an aerobic workout indoors. One such type of aerobic exercise machine is a stationary bicycle. Generally speaking, stationary bicycles include a resistance mechanism that resists the rotation of foot pedals in a crank assembly. Other popular exercise machines that allow a user to perform aerobic exercises indoors include elliptical machines, rowing machines, stepper machines, and treadmills to name a few.
One type of stationary bicycle is described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,585,561 issued to Jonathan B. Watt. In this reference, an exercise bike is described as including a magnetic braking system to resist rotation of a flywheel. The magnetic braking system may be magnets mounted on brackets that are selectively pivoted relative to the frame to increase or decrease the resistance opposing rotation of the flywheel. The brackets may be pivoted using a brake adjustment assembly joined to the brackets in such a manner that the magnetic forces resisting rotation of the flywheel increase or decrease in a proportional manner over at least a portion of the adjustment range of the brake adjustment assembly. As a friction brake pad engages the flywheel, the magnets also overlap the flywheel. Thus, in addition to the friction force applied to the flywheel that resists rotation of the flywheel, the rotation of the flywheel is also resisted by the eddy current brake. Because of this additional eddy current braking force, the force that needs to be applied between the brake pads and the flywheel for the friction brake to stop the flywheel within a given time period for a given cadence may be less than the force required for a comparable friction brake alone. In other words, it may take less force input from the user to stop the flywheel in a given time period with the friction brake when combined with the eddy current brake than it does when the friction brake is not combined with an eddy current brake.